Posted 2/06/2008 05:54:00 PM by Douglas

Evangelical Christians overwhelming support Jews and Israel, yet the feeling is certainly not mutual. Why is that?

Evangelical Christians have a high opinion not just of the Jewish state but of Jews as people. That Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal doesn’t seem to bother evangelicals, despite their own conservative politics. Yet Jews don’t return the favor: in one Pew survey, 42 percent of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals and fundamentalists. As two scholars from Baruch College have shown, a much smaller fraction—about 16 percent—of the American public has similarly antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists.

How long is this going to take to get to the millenarial dispensationalists? Oh yeah, about four paragraphs

The reason that conservative Christians—opposed to abortion and gay marriage and critical of political liberalism—can feel kindly toward Jewish liberals and support Israel so fervently is rooted in theology. One finds among fundamentalist Protestants a doctrine called dispensationalism. The dispensationalist outlook, which began in early-nineteenth-century England, sees human history as a series of seven periods, or dispensations, in each of which God deals with man in a distinctive way. The first, before Adam’s fall, was the era of innocence; the second, from Adam to Noah, the era of conscience; the third, from Noah to Abraham, of government; the fourth, from Abraham to Moses, of patriarchy; the fifth, from Moses to Jesus, of Mosaic law; and the sixth, from Jesus until today, of grace. The seventh and final dispensation, yet to come, will be the Millennium, an earthly paradise.

Interesting. Some should find this a bit alarming that we're supporting Israel so we can build the Temple that much sooner, but you gotta see their point: If that's gonna get JC to come back sooner, why not speed things along? Where they lose me, and the author comes across as a total idiot is here:

They believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and worry about the decay of morality; they must wish, therefore, to impose a conservative moral code, alter the direction of the country so that it conforms to God’s will, require public schools to teach Christian beliefs, and crush the rights of minorities.

Yes yes yes, that's exactly what evangelicals want, to crush the rights of minorities. That must sound ever so enlightening at dinner parties on the upper west side, but it just sounds so ridiculous that you know this guy is a leftist-tard.